Sunday, August 24, 2008

Wrinkles Were Actually Studied In Art Schools Once

Eddie is fascinated with wrinkles. He can talk for hours about them. He makes me think about them. While we had illuminating discussion of wrinkle theory over pizza one evening, I drew this sketch of how I remembered George Wunder's wrinkle technique looked.

I'm personally interested in how wrinkles are drawn in cartoons and comics. Honestly, most people can't draw wrinkles for crap. Me, included. I learned the "cartoon skin" approach to wrinkles from classic cartoons.Bob McKimson just wraps the clothes (and fur) skin tight onto the characters.

Even Rod Scribner, who is known for liking wrinkles, just draws loose fitting cartoon skin.
See how real wrinkles look. Nothing at all like cartoons.

Here are a couple variations of loose cartoon skin.
I think it's funny that even though this Mickey toy is actually made of fabric, they went out of their way to sew it up as tight as cartoon skin. Wouldn't it be cool to dress like this in real life?

Wrinkles are extremely complicated, and there is actually a physical science of how they work, which is much too complicated for cartoonists.

Old time illustrators like Rockwell, were wrinkle masters.
Wrinkles at one time were studied at art school. It was considered a serious part of art fundamentals. Art schools in general must have been much more serious about actually teaching you things at one time.

Eddie's theory is that art schools should be run like fascism. When I see the results of this kind of teaching 80-100 years ago and more, I tend to agree.

Comic strip wrinkles.

Milton Caniff loved wrinkles and he developed a style of drawing them that was widely copied by other comic strip and book artists. These wrinkles are more realistic ha cartoon wrinkles, but I suspect that they were copied superficially from illustrators like Rockwell.
Comic artists and cartoonists tend to be self taught. These old time great ones had much higher standards of art to imitate that we do though and so their superficiality is still much more skilled than our generations'. That's because we are 20 steps removed from the real thing and they were only 1 or 2.

I always loved Jack Kirby's wrinkles. I don't know if they are strictly sensible, or just stylized from copying his own heroes' work.
Kirby is especially rebellious, because he took a whole comic genre that can only be convincing with cartoon skin and then he went and sagged and wrinkled it up.

Superheroes wear cartoon skin underwear to show off their muscles. When a real live person wears a superhero suit, it is much less impressive and points to how wacky the whole idea of superheroes is. That didn't stop Kirby from creating the first superheroes that wore realistic saggy, lumpy underwear.

32 comments:

Natural looking, interesting, logical folds are even harder to draw from imagination than the human figure, imo. Even if one has grasped the science behind how the various forms of folds are created, putting it down on paper with the proper topograpical rendering and variation is another thing all together.

I think this is a prime area that great masters never left to chance. Even if figures were done from imagination, everything from posable mannikins to soaking cloth in paper mache has been used in the proper study of wrinkles.

Unless you have a photographic memory like Frazetta supposedly has, but even his folds are nowhere near as correct, elaborate, or specific as a Rockwell or Ingres.

At my animation school, one of the life drawing teachers taught us that in order to draw convincing wrinkles you have to draw a cylinder first. I guess the basic construction of a wrinkle is a cylinder. I never did get the hang of it.

I go to a very expensive fascist art schoool. You learn not to argue and not to ask why. Your drawing skill improves incredibly. Its not fun but you are not paying to have fun, you are paying to learn to draw.

Thanks! Kirby was a genius within his field of comics art! Sole creator of the core of the Marvel universe (with the exceptions of Ditko's creations: Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, and the gold-suited version of Iron Man).

I saw Jessica Alba in a blue-screen suit once. She certainly pulled off cartoon skin in reality.

I'm kind of afraid that the solution to this is to hire models and dress them in accurate costumes, photographing them in detail for every tableau. Then carefully lightbox these photos, having done value studies to get colours and blacks right. Only then are you ready to attempt the first preliminary drawings, but by that time the deadline's gone, and you're broke.

Hey John,I'm watching an old MGM cartoon right now, there's wrinkles everywhere. It adds so much life to the characters. One of the cat characters scoops up the side walk like a sheet. Pretty cool. I had no idea how critical the wrinkle is in animation, or atleast in really good animation.

I think The Kirby's use of the the old "I've got a load on" saggy underwear is one of the reasons his characters seem so alive. The relatability of his baggy-pants reality is only emphasized by the explosive energy of barely contained emotions. Man, that cat was solid gold! John I know you've talked about Kirby before, but if you could do an in-depth post about his influence on you, I would eat it like iced-cream. As a guy who just discovered Kirby within the last year, I would love to hear what one great illustrator of explosive emotion had to say about the other.

the first thing I'd like to say is Norman Rockwell is too good to be real.

I'm not convinced that artschool needs to be fascist. I don't think there's any substitute for being personally drivin. Whoever wants to learn and is determined to grow, will learn and grow, and whoever wants to play video games and go out drinking will play video games and go out drinking. I don't think artschool ought to be all namby pamby and touchy feely. I just think it needs to be an enviornment where the student is given deadlines, and instruction, and facilities conducive for learning.

Maybe Pixar should put themselves to the task of making the wrinkle revolution. They could start small with tight-belt shirt wrinkles, and gradually escalate to full-blown slept-in suits from the forties.

I guess wrinkles and folds in drawing is all a matter of portraying shadow and light.Cartoon and animation type designs are obviously kept as simple as possible as they have to be drawn so many times. A single line rarely does the trick... But Kahl got it on the button in some of the Trusty the dog scenes he did in "Lady And The Tramp" didn't he. Damn, talk about wrinkles!

http://hometown.aol.com/vltdisney/trusty01.gif

When they started xeroxing their drawings in the 60s most Disney films had that lovely balance between simple/stylized flat design, and a real fleshiness with their characters full of creases and folds.

The Flemish masters (Van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Petrus Christus, Van Eyck) have an advanced sense of the fold that still related to the very awkward, very frontal sense of space which can be traced back to Byzantine icon paintings, (whose folds are a bizarre procession of very graphic cracks). However, the formula inwhich lines and contours relate in Byzantine painting can still be seen in Leonardo's drapery studies, (such as the one posted here). Method invades natural observation!!!

Hi John, I think the Academy of Art in San Francisco teaches wrinkles. There are two classes in the Foundations dept. One features an assignment where the draws a lit draped cloth for a minimum of 15 hours. The assignment is designed to teach light sources, wrinkles and patience. Then there the next class with the great Henry Yan called heads and hands which concentrates on people.Schools with classical training are out there, you just gotta dig through all the Concept Art schools to find them. I think Art Center, and Cooper Union are two other good schools that stress classical training as well.

I don't think art schools need to be fascistic, but I do think that they need to pass or fail students depending on technique, rather than "message".

Actual comment from a videogame message board I frequent:

"Art isn't decoration. Art isn't prettiness. Art is a form of anti-mainstream expression. It is supposed to offend, to provoke, to make you think thoughts you never thought before. And get a new outlook on things."

With this kind of lop-sided perspective on what art is -- i.e., it doesn't matter what you do or how well you do it, the only defining criterion of art is its political message -- is it any wonder that art education has gone down the proverbial crapper? (The particular artistic item under discussion was not a drawing or sculpture, but a version of Space Invaders rigged so that the invaders destroy the towers of the World Trade Center.)

For an example of a non-fascistic, but still technique-focused, art educator I would perhaps cite Betty Edwards. I hear nothing but good things about her system.

A friend of mine who has no interest whatsoever in being an artist can draw the most perfect, amazing wrinkles you've ever seen.

That's about all he can draw, mind you but still! He has pages of wrinkled paper sacks, copied wrinkles from fashion magazines and crumpled up pieces of paper. It fascinates him yet he's extremely nonchalant about it.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Wrinkles are a lost art form, I think with the abstraction of the art form based on photography the style chaged over the years. Once people no longer needed a highly realist rendition of what people looked like, they no longer did the wrinkles. I haven't studied wrinkles ever but I have studied da vinci and can reproduce his sketches. It's a lot of fun to do.Here is a small peom based on your findings,

"Wrinkles in Time"With loss comes sacrifice of the artifical work.When once we sought haven we now turn to darkness. The lines of wrinkles stay on the person, but not in the face of time.

Look forward to your next insightful thought process on the artform of animmation, Will

I've seen some very interesting folds and wrinkles in the cartoons from The Maxx (back from MTV's Oddities in the 90s.) Look at the cape/outfit worn by Mr.Gone and also the clothing on characters. The animators were trying to get as close to the original comic book art from Sam Kieth, who I remember once said his work was heavily influenced by Frank Frazetta. I think it's a great example of comic book and animation study on wrinkles.

Kudos for Schribner for being able to animate wrinkles that enhance, rather than detract, from an animated character.

Meanwhile, CGI wrinkles are relatively easy to add as textures, but animating them is a pain, especially for games using low resolution character meshes (one can often see underlying triangles in character's clothing folds).

That poor Disney Cinderella Prince's one of animation's most reviled characters (his animator, Eric Larson, wasn't thrilled either), yet princey was copied frame by frame for Fox's Antastasia. Princey got more dynamic in CINDERELLA III but still followed all the JK observations.